Category: Awards

Laurie Brown is one of our jurors for the artist awards and she explains why she loves doing it. Join us at the 2018 awards ceremony and meet the artists, the jury and help us celebrate another year of incredible creations!

The winners of the 2018 K.M. Hunter Artist Awards were announced today. The six winners will be honoured by the K.M. Hunter Charitable Foundation at an event at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto in June.

A prize of $8,000 was awarded in each of six arts disciplines to:

Dance Christine Friday, Ottawa

Theatre Matthew Heiti, Sudbury

Literature Shane Book, Ottawa

Media Arts Luo Li, Dundas

Music Allison Cameron, Toronto

Visual Arts Cree Stevens, Thunder Bay

The annual awards are given to Ontario residents to support mid-career, professional artists who have a reasonable body of work, a fair degree of public exposure, have made an impact in their chosen field and demonstrate an original artistic voice within their artistic tradition. The awards are a means of encouraging their craft and propelling them to the next level.

“We are very impressed at the caliber of artists our awards attract and wish all the winners this year great success in the pursuit of their work,” says Sarah Hunter, President, K.M. Hunter Charitable Foundation. “We also would like to thank Dave Carley, Damiano Pietropaolo, and Bernard Leroux in helping chair our juries this year. We welcome this year’s winners into the growing family of artists who have received the K.M. Hunter Artist Awards.”

Since the awards were created in 1995, 139 artists have received awards totaling $940,500.

The Ontario Arts Council (OAC) Awards Office administers the nomination process for the K.M. Hunter Artist Awards. OAC juries nominate candidates from OAC project grant programs that accept applications from professional artists in each of the Award categories. The K.M. Hunter Charitable Foundation convenes six juries to select the winners of the awards. The awards are financed by a gift from the K.M. Hunter Charitable Foundation to the Ontario Arts Foundation.

Each year the we help Ontario artists by awarding them unrestricted grants in the areas of Dance, Film, Literature, Music, Theatre and the Visual Arts. This year’s award winners will be announced on April 16, 2018.

We are preparing for this year’s K.M. Hunter Foundation Awards and our judges have their work cut out for them! With so many creative people, we can’t wait to celebrate some of them with you. Details coming soon.

Every year we award a grant of $8000.00 to six individual artists in the areas of Visual Art, Dance, Theatre, Literature, Film& Video and Music. Recipients are recommended for this award by the Ontario Arts Council juries who put names forward from their own individual juries. You can not apply for this grant except through applying to the Ontario Arts Council. They provide short lists of candidates put forward by their jurors from the applicants for their various programs. It is not possible to apply directly for these awards.

The arts awards were created in 1995 but the program only achieved its present definition in 2000. The awards are made to individual emerging artists who have completed their training, begun to produce a body of work, and are starting to make a significant mark in their field. It is intended that the awards be given to people who have demonstrated both talent and the potential for further development.

Imagination, originality and the determination to achieve are taken into consideration. The concern is not so much to pick future stars as to reward and encourage people who we believe will go on to do interesting work.

Every year we award a grant of $8000.00 to six individual artists in the areas of Visual Art, Dance, Theatre, Literature, Film and Video, and Music. Recipients are recommended for this award by the Ontario Arts Council juries who put names forward from their own individual juries. You can not apply for this grant except through applying to the Ontario Arts Council.

Imagination, originality and the determination to achieve are taken into consideration. The concern is not so much to pick future stars as to reward and encourage people who we believe will go on to do interesting work.

“Thinking about the pot as a metaphor for the psyche or the body, the eternal space. The material clay is about time and that’s partly why I became interested in it…” –Maura Doyle, 2017 K.M. Hunter Awards recipient, Visual Art

The corner stone of SickKids is the community and now, more than ever, they need us!

The invention of Pablum. The first successful separation of conjoined twins. The first kidney transplant from a living donor. Discovering the gene responsible for cystic fibrosis. Their long record of research breakthroughs is proof of their fight against childhood illness and disease.

As a longtime financial supporter of SickKids, the K. M. Hunter Foundation is proud to play our role in creating strong and healthy communities, beginning with the kids. Please support their work.

For over fifty years, Martin Hunter’s passion for theatre and the performing arts has influenced generations of Canadian talent. Bright Particular Stars offers his comprehensive and fully illustrated history of over thirty of the greatest Canadian performers from stage and screen. From music, there are wide-ranging and insightful chapters on Leonard Cohen, Buffy Saint-Marie and Joni Mitchell. From the theatre stage, sections include Colm Fiore, Christopher Plummer and William Hutt. From film and television, come astute chapters on Sarah Polly, Robert LePage and many more. Lavishly illustrated with over 250 images, Bright Particular Stars is a definitive overview of the best Canadian stage and screen performers from the last fifty years. Available through Amazon.

“I often say humorously that “dance can save the world”, but I actually believe this – working with dancers always moves me by their willingness and ability to embody ideas that are beyond words and spoken language. I have learned a lot about empathy and bridging difference led by the integrating qualities of the dancing body/mind/heart. Also, it is through dance that the dancing shaman unites the worlds of the seen and unseen. These abiding sentiments form the base-line of all my works. It is my vocation and my happiness to follow them.”

Tribal Crackling Wind is a distinctive creative force, bringing riveting ritual-based events to acclaim in its native Canada and internationally at prestigious festivals and venues. The company’s repertoire has been shaped by the multi-faceted creativity of Peter Chin’s leadership. To donate

The Ontario Arts Council (OAC) Awards Office administers the nomination process for the K. M. Hunter Artist Awards. OAC juries nominate candidates from OAC project grant programs that accept applications from professional artists in each of the Award categories. The K. M. Hunter Charitable Foundation convenes six juries to select the winners of the awards.

“It feels amazing but it’s really scary because in this line of work if you take a break for twenty minutes you’re not going to have a career to come back to.” –Jaron Freeman-Fox, 2017 K.M. Hunter Awards recipient, Music

Evalyn Parry has previously been a K. M. Hunter Foundation award recipient (2013) and returns to the stage in their newest offering is Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools.

A concert and a conversation, Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools is the meeting place of two people, and the North and South of our country. Inuk artist Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and queer theatre-maker Evalyn Parry met on an Arctic expedition from Iqaluit to Greenland. Now sharing a stage, these two powerful storytellers map new territory together in a work that gives voice and body to the histories, culture, and climate we’ve inherited, and asks how we reckon with these sharp tools.

Kenneth Martin Hunter was born in 1903 on a farm near the village of Cardinal in eastern Ontario. He came to Toronto at the age of eighteen and after qualifying as a chartered accountant went to work as secretary-treasurer of the Buntin Reid Paper Company, one of the larger paper merchants in the country. He subsequently became President and chief shareholder of the company where he remained until he retired at the age of 70.

“At the end of the day you are creating something memorable for the audience that is witnessing what you are doing. Therefore I think you should challenge the audience and find something that can connect into the work.” –Apologia Velasquez, 2017 K.M. Hunter Awards recipient, Dance

“Often the sign is that I get goose-bumps and it doesn’t get out of my head for days and days. It becomes a physical need to tell the story.” –Elizabeth Lazebnik, 2017 K.M. Hunter Awards recipient, Media Arts

The K. M. Hunter Foundation is proud to support the work of Crossroads International (www.cintl.org) who support women who have experienced violence and rape as well as helping impoverished women to establish income-generating activities to support their families. As women develop skills and confidence they are increasingly raising their voices to demand equal rights.

Current research shows that of the 26 per cent of Swazi adults infected with HIV/AIDS, 60 per cent are women. There is a critical link between excessively high levels of HIV/AIDS infection among women and gender based violence, lack of awareness of women’s rights, and inadequate support services for survivors of violence. Girls’ empowerment clubs respond to these harsh realities by providing a safe space where girls meet on a weekly basis to participate in discussions and activities guided by teachers and mentors focused on human rights, identifying and reporting abuse, and developing awareness of HIV/AIDS and its transmission. Empowerment clubs are a place where girls can speak their minds and develop the courage and determination necessary to build a brighter future for themselves and their communities. In short, girls who attend empowerment clubs know that they have the power to change their world.